Its our privilege to announce that the biography and bibliography of QUITO NICOLAAS, Aruban author based in The Netherlands, will be published in the “Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography” edited by Franklin Knight & Henry Louis Gates Jr., on 21rst of July 2016 by the Oxford University Press.

The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography is a major biographical reference work covering the lives and legacies of notable Afro-descendants from the Caribbean and Latin American, men and women from all eras and walks of life. This groundbreaking resource provides unprecedented coverage of the region through the lives of its people.

Astrid H. Roemer received on Thursday 19th of May the 2016 P.C. Hooft Award. The award, which this year is intended for prose, was traditionally awarded to her at the Literary Museum in The Hague. The prestigious prize has a sum attached to it of € 60,000.

‘Today the most important Dutch writer of the post-colonial era is being honored. And today for the first time a black woman receives the P.C. Hooft Award. These are two facts of great importance to our literature and for The Netherlands.’ said Elsbeth Etty in her laudatio.

According to the jury of the P.C. Hooft Award Roemer is unique in the Dutch literature, a writer whose body of work reflects her own voice completely.

‘She recounts experiences of getting uprooted, and does so in a prose that is disconnected from literary conventions. She dares to take risks, in the construction of novels, in her language, and in the subjects she writes on.’ – according to the jury.

‘Writers who take a lot of risks, who are original and who show a high literary commintent in their work, are vital for the arts. They deserve all attention when they write books that are against the tribulation of commercialism and popularization in the media. Astrid H. Roemer belongs to that category. With this nomination for the 2016 P.C. Hooft Award the jury wants to show her appreciation for the voice of a Surinamese-Dutch writer who with her work breaks open the limits of Dutch literature in an intriguing and challenging way’, said the jury.

Head of the National Foundation, wants you to love reading

Lisa Lucas is a rare combination: a high-energy bookish extrovert.

“If I can convince a small fraction of people to feel the same way that I feel about reading,” she said, “then I’ve done my job.”

It was only her third day as head of the National Book Foundation, the third person to lead it in three decades. And while it’s her job to keep the National Book Awards and the foundation’s other programs going, she is clearly poised to bring the organization to a new level.

“People who like movies watch the Oscars,” she said. “Why don’t we celebrate books in the same way?”

Her Wall Street office was lined with nearly bare bookshelves, and the hallway outside was filled with outgoing boxes of books. In two weeks publishers would begin flooding the foundation with submissions for the 2016 National Book Awards, which have been given in various forms since 1950. The National Book Foundation was created to manage the awards and its annual November ceremony.

“For me, it has always felt like the Oscars of books,” she said. “I think that we need more people to feel like that.”

The National Book Awards, after all, gave its young adult literature prize to Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” despite sometimes controversial subject matter; it’s the prize that brought Patti Smith to tears when her memoir, “Just Kids,” won the nonfiction prize, and was met with a surge of social media delight when Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” received the nonfiction prize in 2015. Novelists William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, John Updike and Philip Roth won the fiction prize more than once.

FINDING TIME TO READ WHEN YOU WORK ALL THE TIME

Deya Bhattacharya, human rights lawyer, tells us how she balances between work and reading.

Eight years ago, at the start of law school, I was told that the schedule is going to be so rigorous that there was a huge possibility that I’d have to give up reading. I am quite proud to say that I read far more in law school than I had ever read before – I was proving people wrong and the great thing was that this was not at the cost of my grades. Throughout my five years studying law, I discovered newer genres and more well-written characters. I also made a close friend whose life revolved around books: we hit it off immediately. My roommate read a lot too. So, I figured, that these wisecracks were wrong: you have plenty of time to squeeze in some reading despite your long-winding reading list for courses and the insane number of credits per semester.

Cut to life as it is today, I admit I barely have enough time to read. In between a full-time job that requires intense traveling and other adult-ish things, sometimes there’s no other option but to choose between what you want (more reading, some reading, any reading!) and what you need (some sleep, please, a little sleep!). A new (and seemingly bad) habit is staying up way past my bed-time to keep reading. While this was possible in my early twenties, now that I am at the wrong side of twenty (gasp!), it gets difficult to stay up all night and then go to work in the mornings. Yet, I am most obstinate and read only at night – hours after my partner has succumbed to sleep, I will keep blinking into my Kindle until I get through “one more chapter.” Or I will begin an audiobook, convincing myself that I will fall asleep in between but that seldom happens.